I have a distribution of two dimensional point objects. How is it possible to find the nearest N number of points to any given point without iterating over the entire collection of points (and only ...

Let's say a table with two columns has 100 quadrillion records. And I want to find a record that has column #2 equal something.
If column #2 is indexed it returns the result immediately, but if it's ...

A colleague of mine today suggested that we go through all of the queries in our application and to add indices accordingly.
I feel this is premature optimisation because our application is not even ...

I am working on an integration project, where my “app/web service” will sit in the middle serving documents.
Basically, a request is sent with the document id as part of the query string, I check if ...

After you have done a good normalization, do you still need to index the table? How is this going to affect the performance? Will it even affect the performance in some way after a good normalization? ...

I am given a set of sets:
{{a,b}, {a,b,c}, {a,c}, {a,c,f}}
I would like to have a data structure to index those sets such that the following "lookup" is executed fast: find all supersets of a given ...

This question is based on some testing I've done recently in order to better understand SQL indexing system.
Table with 500k entries, InnoDB engine
This is a simple select query on a varchar field. ...

I have a table with about 37 indexes. Would that be considered too many? What are some best practices regarding indexing?
EDIT: It is warehousing data, updated daily with new transactions. There are ...

There are more than a few questions that hop into mind when someone thinks about Google's indexing services. Jeff Atwood wrote about them at The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture and Trouble In ...

I have the following problem: I have a database containing more than 2 million records.
Each record has a string field X and I want to display a list of records for which field X contains a certain ...

I have been working on making a completely offline dictionary using the Wiktionary XML dumps. The dumps themselves are about 10 MB, but when converted into a index using a search engine indexer (I use ...

I work at a large company, and we are stuck with a crappy home-baked bug tracking tool, which does too many things half-decently, but it search functionality is next-to-impossible to use (has about 80 ...